It takes billions of years to create a human being. And it takes only a few seconds to die.

But if the history of mankind was her own history, in a way she was thousands of years old.

So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that for adults. Most adults accept the world as a matter of course. This is precisely where philosophers are a notable exception. A philosopher never gets quite used to the world. To him or her, the world continues to seem a bit unreasonable - bewildering, even enigmatic. Philosophers and small children thus have an important faculty in common. The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder…

When you realize there is something you don't understand, then you're generally on the right path to understanding all kinds of things.

A philosopher knows that in reality he knows very little. That is why he constantly strives to achieve true insight. Socrates was one of these rare people. He knew that he knew nothing about life and about the world. And now comes the important part: it troubled him that he knew so little.

When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.